A genre of science fiction and a lawless subculture in an oppressive society dominated by computer technology and big corporations.Hmmm...It feels like the world we live in today.

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It was the game Half Life 2 for me. Something about the futuristic yet grim and totalitarian nature of City 17 just "clicked". The claustrophobic atmosphere, the hi-tech-but also broken and near-apocalyptic conditions brought on by the war against the Combine, the toe-curling eeriness of hearing shit like this come out of nowhere. From then, I happened on some art pictures, much like the cityscapes posted in this subreddit, but I didn't know the name of the style for some years.

I'm interested in what brings people to the niches they fall into, and would love to hear about your formative experiences with this stuff.

The Syndicate Wars Intro without a doubt. I was only 10 when I first played this game (yeah, that's right, fuck the ESRB, wanna fight about it?) but the intro stuck with me. Fallout 2's intro reminded me of it too some years later, which spurred me to consume as much media as possible related to the genre. I'm gonna have to say Max Headroom and Reboot were big early influences as well.

Later, when I matured a bit and was able to digest media on a more sophisticated level, I watched Blade Runner and it blew my mind on a level that's hard to articulate. I still watch that movie once a year and find new things to appreciate about it. I realized there was some sort of conjunction between my cynicism of 'The Man' and the dystopian future that the cyberpunk genre conveyed, which sent me on a media consumption frenzy, from Robocop to William Gibson novels to Billy Idol to Shadowrun to Ghost in the Shell and even trying to convince my friends that we should totally play Cyberpunk 2020.

I remember being no more than 12 years old when me and a friend of mine created a cyberpunk setting that we were planning on writing a two-sided story around; his story centered around a group of anti-corporate rebels, and mine sided around the corporations and the greater transhumanist agenda. I still retain a lot of my ideological opinions on the future of technology from this little foray, and later the ideas got adopted into a more sophisticated story that I hope to one day write about.

Anyway, I think this firmly establishes me as a cyberpunk enthusiast, and I totally owe it all to Peter Molyneux.

I kind of grew up in the telecom age, dialing out on a modem in 1984 for the first time. I suppose it was the Max Headroom (20 Minutes Into the Future) sci-fi series which really provided a template for the future back then in terms of considering where all of these networks were leading...

What I assumed at the time is people born in or after the BBS age would mostly be cyberpunk to one extent or another, leveraging communications technology both in a transhumanist sense, but also having it be an inseparable part of their culture and worldview. I also assumed people born then (who I considered lucky at the time), having never known a non-wired world, would all be skilled hackers by the time they were 8.

Instead, what I seem to mostly see are people who use technology but have no idea how it works. I see people sending lewd photos and videos around the Internet and actually expressing shock when those things become public. Facebook's popularity -- a rush for people to basically provide endless torrents of personal information to a surveillance state - continues to boggle my mind. I see naivete. "Oh, you're really going to post a youtube video of you doing bong rips. I see."

The aesthetic of cyberpunk is just a pose if you imitate cyberpunk tropes. The actual aesthetic should grow out of a worldview in which we are all connected, all surveilled, with technology accessible to all of us.

I am pretty old now, and my past several months have been dedicated to helping myself disappear from the Internet; to erase my footprint. This has involved writing letters, faxing things, and submitting forms to have information removed from people-tracking databases and the like.

Basically, I guess while everyone else is rushing to be famous for 15 minutes on YouTube, I want to be a Blank (Max Headroom fans should be familiar with the concept), or at very least, what you find of me online should be molded and shaped by me, to maximize the allure of my online profile to prospective employers and so on.

The paranoid aesthetics of cyberpunk, I guess, still appeal. I like using encryption and the darknets to a specific end and when I open an encrypted connection to a remote server, I still think of it, visually (in my brain) as a wormhole through a plaintext Internet, except in this case filled with gibberish. I still think of networks spatially. It is still novel to ping a server in Mongolia (I don't think this will change for me.)

I am still interested in utilizing technology to liberate myself in various ways.

But I guess the aesthetics are mostly in my head. I look like a redneck. I like looking like something different from what I am.

I create the (online) narrative about me. I watch what authorities do and use the very technology they create and endorse against their efforts to track, categorize, and brand me.

I poison datasets which contain information about myself.

I have a lot to learn, and none of this has been a perfect success, but people would be surprised how much of "you" can be erased from the Internet with a little effort.

tl;dr: It is the reality of the surveillance state, of databases and tracking people, that led me to it in the hope that it would not be my master. The aesthetics I enjoy are a product of this concern, rather than the source of my interest in cyberpunk. I still think an ASCII-armored PGP key or ciphertext looks cool as hell, in large part because I am aware of just what it is I am looking at.

What I assumed at the time is people born in or after the BBS age would mostly be cyberpunk to one extent or another, leveraging communications technology both in a transhumanist sense, but also having it be an inseparable part of their culture and worldview. I also assumed people born then (who I considered lucky at the time), having never known a non-wired world, would all be skilled hackers by the time they were 8.

Instead, what I seem to mostly see are people who use technology but have no idea how it works. I see people sending lewd photos and videos around the Internet and actually expressing shock when those things become public. Facebook's popularity -- a rush for people to basically provide endless torrents of personal information to a surveillance state - continues to boggle my mind. I see naivete. "Oh, you're really going to post a youtube video of you doing bong rips. I see."

Great post and a really interesting perspective. The internet is older than me, so I'm unfamiliar with the world before it. Living through the infancy of the WWW boom seems like it would have been an interesting (if not daunting) time because of all the different trajectories it could have taken through its effect on the world once its technological potential had been realized. You know those predictions from, say, the year 1900 about the technology that would hypothetically exist 100 years from then? I'd love to read some of what people thought would become of the internet before it "found its place" as a global hub of e-commerce and social networking. It seems that William Gibson got it right in his depiction of the Matrix from Neuromancer.

After reading this post I'll admit I'm a bit disappointed that your prediction didn't come to fruition, in the sense of a world completely in-tune with technology, since the internet generation would have been quite literally born into it.

The WWW boom was interesting; I was fortunate enough to have a University shell account before GUI browsers and the like were available. I remember getting my university account in 1991, and, used to the dialup modem paradigm (you dial into individual systems and then disconnect), was confused about FTP sites and Gopherspace. I couldn't believe that I was actually grabbing data from thousands of miles away -- "for free."

If you're interested, there are a lot of interesting videos about computing from that time available, some of which deal with the early Internet. A not-bad place to start would be with an old show called Computer Chronicles, which started in the early 1980s:

Living through the infancy of the WWW boom seems like it would have been an interesting (if not daunting) time because of all the different trajectories it could have taken through its effect on the world once its technological potential had been realized.

What is particularly interesting is the number of people who insisted it was just a fad. There is a great episode of a British show called The Net from the 1990s where the CEO of Blockbuster insists he doesn't care about the Internet and he can't see any future in which people watch movies on it. Oops!

The first time I ever saw a graphical browser was at an IBM release presentation/event for OS/2 Warp. I remember watching them go around to various sites (Disney, I remember), thinking just this:

The universe is about to change.

I used to stay late at my high school sometimes to research various topics in the library which interested me (like radical politics, which is everywhere now but more difficult to find in the suburbs). In that single presentation, I saw the end of card catalogs, the end of carrying a notebook around with me to think of things to look up next time I was at the library. I knew it would explode, and I knew it would change everything from our language to our assumptions about other cultures. Its universal adoption was the only thing in question: is this too nerdy for people?

Windows 95 and its dialup networking module actually made the Internet possible by making getting online simple.

There were some very well-paid people at the time who were saying, "meh."

You know those predictions from, say, the year 1900 about the technology that would hypothetically exist 100 years from then? I'd love to read some of what people thought would become of the internet before it "found its place" as a global hub of e-commerce and social networking.

Those of us who embraced it from before the WWW, I think, knew it was going in the direction it was. Compuserve and other dialup services had shopping, and as soon as Windows 95 came out, you saw stores popping up everywhere. One thing I did not see coming was all of the ads, commercial malware, and the like. I am still fairly aghast at what people put up with in Android apps or pop-over ads on web pages.

One of my hobbies now is collecting old documentaries, tv shows, and the like, about the early days of computing; I've got gigabytes and gigabytes of old educational shows about "home computers" (a term you don't really hear anymore, but this predates "PC").

One thing which may be of interest, if you haven't seen it, is this old ARPAnet documentary, Heralds of Resource Sharing which shows the state of what would eventually become the Internet -- from 1972 (the year I was born.)

That was really interesting, thank you. It's surreal hearing the word "debugging" in a film from the early seventies. Do you see the 90's as a golden age of the internet and personal computing (given your gripe with the current state of social networking, advertising, etc)? There's something endearing and nostalgic to me about that time because it was all so new, and one would figure the honeymoon period hadn't worn off yet and people would still have been in awe whenever they surfed the net, which is considered mundane and commonplace now. Honestly, it takes a few seconds of forced self-actualization for me to appreciate the fact that I'm using a machine functioning through code I'll never understand, to transmit data over an immense network grid all over the world so that my words reach your screen in a matter of seconds, and vice versa. It's been a part of my life as long as I can remember and using the internet feels as natural to me as breathing (a fact which some may consider fitting with the theme of this subreddit).

Do you see the 90's as a golden age of the internet and personal computing

I see it as the beginning of the modern age. Before that competing platforms (Atari, Commodore, Tandy, etc.) were not compatible. It was the availability of DIY PC clones which really made things interesting, and still make it interesting.

For all of its flaws, right now, today, is the golden age of the Internet. I would not have expected there ever to be something like YouTube. Nostalgic as I get for certain aspects of the past, I would not trade my Droid or iPhone for it, nor my quadcore processor, nor Linux and virtualization which allows me to run anything I want in a VM.

What bothers me about the modern Internet is the degree to which people take it for granted and shit where they eat, in terms of trolling and being mean to people and posting naked photographs of people without their consent and so on. Those people understand the value of nothing.

There's something endearing and nostalgic to me about that time because it was all so new, and one would figure the honeymoon period hadn't worn off yet and people would still have been in awe whenever they surfed the net, which is considered mundane and commonplace now.

True, but on the other hand, websites back then were mostly static, and even Usenet couldn't compete with something like reddit in terms of its activity. I do miss that "newness," but what I like most is knowing that as I type this message, gigabytes of content is being produced and uploaded - video, text, software, and otherwise. There is no "end" to the Internet now and back then there kinda was. You'd look at static HTML and click around and wait for someone to update the site.

Today, it's, to borrow a Star Trek phrase, "infinite diversity in infinite combinations," or from Ghost in the Shell, "The net is vast and infinite."

Exciting as it was in 1995, it didn't have the feeling of infinity it has now. There were no darknets like i2p or tor, no bitcoin. Today, it truly feels infinite. Sites like The Silk Road have actualized some of the most vivid cyberpunk dreams -- to one extent or another, we can transcend the overbearing reach of the state via technology. When I get too nostalgic and pissed off at reddit and wish for the old days when I'd get to know people by their real names on Usenet, I remember this.

There is a movie based on a Virginia Woolf book called "To The Lighthouse." Speaking of the past, there is a line, "Windows open, doors closed." I think that nails it.

What is to come is going to blow away anything that has come before. I can emulate my first computer, a Commodore 64, on my Android, and I am reminded of where we are now and where we're going.

Honestly, it takes a few seconds of forced self-actualization for me to appreciate the fact that I'm using a machine functioning through code I'll never understand, to transmit data over an immense network grid all over the world so that my words reach your screen in a matter of seconds, and vice versa.

It is not a miracle but it is as damn close as we get. What would Gutenberg have made of this? What would the alchemists have made? They'd smash all of their labware and demand a laptop immediately.

I took a class on it in college. I had heard about it before, but i really didn't get into it until the class. We studied the classics; Neuromancer, Snow Crash, the Ware books. We read short stories, watched ghost in the shell, the matrix. I was totally hooked, it was so cool ;_;

I was born two years before the dot-com bubble at Kaiser Premenente in Redwood City. You could say cyberpunk is my destiny. </egotistical> But anyway I guess for me it started in the form of anime, which I was exposed to on Toonami. It started with Mecha and Mobile Suit Gundam, as I dug further I found Ghost in the Shell, and later Serial Experiments Lain on TechTV. Eventually the interest in the genre became greater the older I got and now here I am.

When I was very young (4-6), one of my older computery cousins brought my dad this VHS called "The Gate to the Mind's Eye". It was this bizarre abstract computer animation exhibition set to music, and just like kids do, watching the same movies over and over and over again, I watched this video probably 5 times a week for years. It fascinated me, particularly the opening sequence, "Armageddon." (The hands growing through chainlink fence, the cave paintings coming out of the wall and running from invisible hunters, and the guitars living in a lake of fire who scream when a volcano erupts are other visuals that I found particularly striking as well.) I think that's what embedded me with this sense of techno-fetishism. The aesthetic gives me this strange sense of nostalgia, depth of meaning, and something.. else. It's what first made me wonder about "the future" and "what happens when the world ends" and "what does being human mean?" That aesthetic represented this fantastic fantasy world where other people thought about and cared about these things, and as I grow older and I start to find that there are real places that remind me so strongly of it, I am drawn to them. It imbues me with energy just seeing them, childlike enthusiasm. They are real and I can live in them.

Then again, I had a brother very nearly my age, and he was never particularly interested in the video, so I guess that makes it a difficult chicken/egg argument.

Being into Steampunk and hearing someone discussing Cyberpunk, I wondered what it was and if it was at all similar so I looked into it. Then I realised it was the genre/style/whatever that GiTS fell under, and I always liked that film.

Oddly enough, a card game. I started playing Android: Netrunner last year and then got really into it. I couldn't get enough of the cool ideas of magical technology or running against the corps. I read Snow Crash, then Neuromancer, now onto Count Zero. It's like Noir for geeks!

GURPS, the pen-and-paper RPG system. It wasn't a dedicated cyberpunk setting like Shadowrun or 2020, but it still explained what it was and what cyberpunk settings were like. But while GURPS introduced me to the concept, what really sold cyberpunk for me was reading Snow Crash for the first time.

I believe snow crash is where it started for me as well. I could never look back after that. Then I read nueromancer, or I read nueromancer before? Either way after snowcrash I read nueromancer, or reread, and that book was just too beautiful to not make me want to delve more into this culture.

Aw, same here. Most of the books my OG hippie dad gave me were in the Niven/Asimov/Harrison vein, but he had an Ahhhnold fixation that led me to watching Terminator and Total Recall at an impressionable age. I remember thinking the phone hacking in Terminator 2 was the coolest thing.

Haha, awesome. Yeah, Niven and Asimov were a big part of my indoctrination to science fiction via my dad too. I left them out to stick with the cyberpunk theme. I think Harrison might have been sillier than my dad's taste, but I happily discovered his books on my own.

Then later, there were some cyberpunk things the old man never really understood, like anime and manga. I tried watching Akira with him as a kid, but it seemed like it couldn't penetrate some preconceptions he must have had about japanese animation or something. Possibly a generational thing. It's like how when Neuromancer came out, and it was known for utterly baffling many readers who simply couldn't parse the sentences. That was my dad with Akira, it was almost just like confusing colors and shapes to him.

My experience will probably be pretty rare. My very first exposure to cyberpunk came with the rulebook to Spectre VR. There was a quite lengthy (page 11-21) short story in there about a dude named Hart who participates in the digital tank game. Though the story's intro says it will help the reader "understand how the game is played," it does nothing of the sort. Maybe it was thrown in to pad out the pages, back when games still had physical rulebooks.

Though a story in a manual might seem like weak sauce, I was hooked by the idea of techno-junkies living on the edge of society, being hassled by organized crime and staying a step ahead of the cops. The little details, like custom cocktails of antibodies to keep the wealthy young, the destruction of the ozone layer, and even lines like "Suck my interface!" thrilled me. But what really got me was the idea of plugging a game directly into one's brain, and the way the story describes dropping into cyberspace.

Maybe that's part of the reason I'm such a weird purist when it comes to cyberpunk. This story in the middle of a rulebook wasn't about magic or humanlike robots; it felt like a real future that was already on its way.

I'd always thought the Matrix and terminator movies were cool as a kid, but I didn't realize they had cyberpunk attributes until discovering cyberpunk itself.

The main thing, I think, was the Neo Tokyo level in Time Splitters 2. I actively went searching for other media related to, or similar to that level and the idea of Neo Tokyo. Saw Bladerunner, got into GitS and Gundam and Deus Ex, read Neuromancer, haven't turned back.

The Time Machine was my first sci-fi book, and also my first view of a dystopian future. It was a good eye-opener, even if I was 12 years old at the time. Eventually I started digging for more stuff; apocalyptic and post-apocayptic works, until I stumbled upon the term "singularity" after reading Asimov's 'The Last Question'. After that, it was only a matter of time before I found the coughWikipedia article on Cyberpunkcough.

I always liked science fiction but even as a young person, the big guns of scifi Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, etc. didn't work for me. I didn't care for far off futures where everyone wore unitards. I wanted something closer to the present, where people still listened to rock music, futures that didn't work that great.

I first saw what I liked in New Wave SciFi. Mostly in anthologies, short stories by people like Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard.

At some point, when I was around 13 or 14 I heard of a book called Neuromancer in a magazine. I checked it out of the library and it blew the top off of my head. I don't think I really understood it that first reading but the sheer difference stuck with me.

Ghost in the Shell, the first movie, I think, saw it when was young. I liked the idea of hacking people's brains and what not, and the consciousness floating around the net, taking control of androids and what not. Later I saw Bladerunner which made me delve deeper. I've always liked scifi, but there's something about cyberpunk which sets it apart from a lot of the other stuff.

I've been into electronics all my life, grew Up surrounded by early computers and synths, got into drum & bass, dubstep, darkstep, i always felt myself closer to a cyborg than a human, i always felt that our future is a mix between 1984, terminator and GATTACA.

I think it was when I found out about the Kowloon Walled City. That's how I found this subreddit at least. At this point I was already into dystopian sci-fi after reading 1984 and playing Half-Life 2 and such.

I started to like Steampunk at first. Steampunk is awesome and all, but it's largely just a fashion there is very little rooted in a sort of reality.

Cyberpunk is reality, we're literally always on the edge of entering a world that is Cyberpunk, a world where corporations have more power than governments and as the world gets more cramped you see more engineering feats to squeeze in as many people as possible giving birth to a cyberpunk distopian urban landscape.

I think reality seeded my interest in Cyberpunk, it seems like the inevitable path we're on right now.

Agreed.....between Akira, PKD (particularly Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep...later made into Blade Runner by Ridley Scott), Gibson, and most heavy metal from back in the day...I was ruined by the time I first saw the GITS movie or the Fox TV show Dark Angle.